


At a Flea Market in Marais

by angelinthecity



Category: Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman, Find Me - André Aciman
Genre: Find me spoilers, M/M, Maynard's POV, Memories, The Postcard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 14:39:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21272837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelinthecity/pseuds/angelinthecity
Summary: A young man is enthralled by a young Italian boy whom he barely dares to talk to, even if he shares a bathroom with him for an entire summer. He keeps thinking of the boy after he leaves, hoping he’ll think of him sometimes, too. Years later, the man hears his old friend Oliver from his graduate school days has captured the boy’s heart and all the man gets is Oliver’s old apartment.Inspired by the re-emergence of the elusive Maynard character inFind Me.





	At a Flea Market in Marais

**Author's Note:**

> I started thinking about the fate of the poor Maynard too hard and this came out. Sorry. Just go with it.
> 
> This is canon compliant so nothing actually happens between them, but Elio is mostly fifteen in Maynard’s memories. Just wanted to point that out beforehand in case the idea of that bothers someone.
> 
> Please note the “Find Me spoilers” tag.

The gingko trees under my window were at their golden peak when I heard he and his wife had gotten divorced. It surprised me; when I had last seen him, meeting him over coffee to discuss their moving out and my moving in, there had been no looming signs of unhappiness.

“Maynard, good to see you,” he had said and shaken my hand in his typical, jovial way.

We had talked briefly about his sabbatical ending and their subsequent move back to New Hampshire; he would return to his old position there. People did that all the time, came and went, and nothing had seemed out of the ordinary. Then again, already in graduate school Oliver had known what to flaunt and what to keep hidden from prying eyes.

Decent, rent-controlled apartments were hard to come by on the Upper West Side, so I had been secretly happy they were leaving and elated at the thought of procuring the apartment after them. Thus, I had thought nothing more of the whole thing, and instead, already relished the upcoming short walks to work that would replace the morning commutes on the two trains that I had to take before I even got on the one that finally took me to the 116th Street stop.

I was less surprised when I heard, a little while later and again through the grapevine, that he’d left. Left the States, moved to Italy, was teaching at the Sapienza now. I never asked anyone why; after I had heard the whispers that it wasn’t a she but a he who had lured him there, I didn’t have to. I remembered the postcard I’d seen at his office, the postcard with the picture of Monet’s berm on it, the postcard I would have recognized anywhere.

I had been whiling away my morning at that Parisian flea market, the last morning before my flight left in the evening. I’d seen the card and instantly remembered the boy. The boy and his berm. He’d told me about it and what it meant to him. It had been one of the rare conversations I had had with him that summer as we didn’t tend to speak much. He had seemed too content spending time on his own, reading, playing the piano, scribbling in his notebooks while his family entertained the guests.

That was the reason I had made myself believe in. The true reason was that I hadn’t dared to. He was only fourteen, I think, or fifteen, but impossibly young, and by the intensity of my desire to talk to him I knew I had to stay away.

One time I had asked to borrow ink from him, and he’d turned to me wearing only his bathing suit as he did so often—too often. He had looked at me with his perceptive gaze because even if he didn’t speak much, he was always watching, keen, and he’d seen right through me in that moment, so I had gotten flustered and fled, barely noticing the requested bottle of ink in my hand.

It was the spell of the house, the hourlessness of the summer days, the bohemians and scholars discussing the paths of love and desire over dinners that stretched long into the night as the prosecco glasses filled themselves. How could I not have awoken in that world?

That’s what I kept telling myself.

But on that drizzly morning when I came upon the postcard, stuffed in a box with dozens of similar ones from the early 1900s at a flea market in Marais, the boy’s eyes were the ones that came to me. I had spent three weeks in Paris by then, always feeling freer there than at home, so on the spur of the moment, I had haggled with the seller and bought the card, written a little note on the back and slid it into an envelope addressed to him. I didn’t remember the exact street address of the house but trusted that the people at the post office of B. would surely know where the Perlmans lived.

When I had stopped by at Oliver’s office many years later, to say a quick hello after my visiting lecture at his university, I had seen the postcard hanging on his wall and instantly remembered. It was now framed, but I remembered he had done a summer residence with the same professor, Professor Perlman, and there was no doubt it was the same picture. The same faded color, the same brushstrokes of the grass.

I was about to ask, but Oliver noticed me looking at it and our eyes met. The look in his eyes told me it wasn’t just any trinket to him and I simply knew, even if I didn’t know how it had happened.

Probably the usual way.

Would anything have been different had I been the one to arrive a few crucial years later? Maybe not. I did feel a sting thinking the boy hadn’t cared to hold onto the postcard and I wondered if Oliver had any idea where it had come from in the first place.

Oliver and I never spoke of it, then or after, and I knew he had a family now, so I thought it had been a summer fatuity. Besides, I understood, all too well.

But so when I heard he’d left his New Hampshire position for the Sapienza, I wasn’t awfully surprised. I had seen the boy’s interview in a trade magazine some years earlier, he was a renowned pianist now, lived in Rome.

He wasn’t a boy anymore, of course. A man. A man whose eyes Oliver now got to look into when the Roman day turned into a Roman night.

I was certain that the boy never thought of me anymore, but when I went home that night, I was strangely comforted by the thought that even if I was here in Oliver and his wife’s old apartment, leaving my coat on a hanger where Oliver had kept his and stepping out onto his old balcony after him, at least I had looked into that boy’s eyes first.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. And I’m actually working on a _Find Me_ inspired Elio/Oliver fic that will hopefully make more sense than this little Maynard divertissement, so stay tuned.


End file.
